Academics Living In Fear

This is what call out culture has begot. An academic climate where teachers are afraid to make students think, and where academics themselves are afraid to say a single word that bucks the status quo. Congrats, guys. You’ve won.

At Reed College in Oregon, where I work, a group of students began protesting the required first-year humanities course a year ago. Three times a week, students sat in the lecture space holding signs — many too obscene to be printed here — condemning the course and its faculty as white supremacists, as anti-black, as not open to dialogue and criticism, on the grounds that we continue to teach, among many other things, Aristotle and Plato.

In the interest of supporting dissent and the free exchange of ideas, the faculty and administration allowed this. Those who felt able to do so lectured surrounded by those signs for the better part of a year. I lectured, but dealt with physical anxiety — lack of sleep, nausea, loss of appetite, inability to focus — in the weeks leading up to my lecture.

“I got many dozens of emails from professors (and administrators and deans and one ex college president) describing how fearful they are of speaking honestly or dissenting on any of these issues.

Personally, liberal students scare the shit out of me... I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.

The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.

Videos from Evergreen have since continued to leak, painting a chaotic portrait of campus in which protesters try to bully administrators into kowtowing to their demands, and in one case even tell the school’s president, George Bridges, to “shut the fuck up.”

“No, fuck you, George. We don’t want to hear a Goddamn thing you have to say,” one protester can be heard saying as Bridges attempts to speak. “You talk so fucking much. No, you shut the fuck up.”

Sarah Lawrence College claims that its mission is to graduate students who are, ‘diverse in every definition of the word.’ Unfortunately, recent events which have been in the national eye, suggest otherwise. And this story involves me.

Seizing on an op-ed I wrote for The New York Times a few months ago, in which I questioned the lack of ideological balance of the school’s extracurricular programming, a group of student protesters calling themselves the Diaspora Coalition labeled me a racist misogynist...

In fact, after the op-ed’s initial publication in October, there was a national media storm in which I was slandered and defamed, my family’s safety was threatened, and my personal property was destroyed on campus.

Weinstein originally caused a ruckus on his very-liberal Washington state university when he sensibly opposed an event that required all whites to depart from the campus for a day. He called the idea a “show of force and an act of oppression.”

For voicing this opinion and being white himself, Weinstein was branded a racist and hounded by campus agitators who demanded his termination. On Thursday, the biology professor had to conduct his class off-campus due to police telling him it wasn’t safe for the mild academic to appear at his place of work.

A white professor's refusal to participate in "Day of Absence"...

"Through a series of decisions made at the highest levels, including to officially support a day of racial segregation, the college has refused to protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence."

Despite attempting to reason with the protesters, Weinstein recalled that the activists “had no apparent interest in the very dialog they seemed to invite,” and said that they were “shouting down my actual students, some of whom had known me for years.”

Campus police advised Weinstein to leave campus, saying they could not ensure his safety, but the protests continued to escalate, climaxing when students held the school’s president and other high-ranking administrators hostage until they agreed to fully comply with a list of demands.

On Tuesday, a group of Evergreen students disrupted a class he was teaching, surrounded him, cursed at him, screamed at him, and called for him to resign or be fired. Campus police have told Weinstein that for his own physical safety, he should stay off campus for a few days. He held his Thursday class in an off-campus park.

The University of California, Berkeley has constructed an emergency escape door for its embattled chancellor in case of potential security threats, such as student protests. The Daily Californian initially reported that the school had completed work on a $9,000 emergency exit in the office of Chancellor Nicholas Dirks over the weekend, dubbing it an “escape hatch” and asserting that construction of the door was requested about a year ago by Dirks’ staff in response to a student protest that obtrusively made its way through his office in April 2015.

Students Protesters Attack Professor...

Murray and Stanger ducked into an administrator's car, but the protesters attacked the car, pounding on it rocking it, and seeking to prevent it from leaving.

The campaign of hurt feelings over basic constitutional rights rocks on across the country, most recently at Amherst College where protesters want administrators to "apologize for signs that lament the death of free speech."

The revolution on college campuses, which seeks to eradicate individuals and ideas that are considered unsavory, constitutes a hostile takeover by fringe elements on the extreme left.

Last spring at the Evergreen State College, where I was a professor for 15 years, the revolution was televised—proudly and intentionally—by the radicals.

Opinions not fitting with the currently accepted dogma—that all white people are racist, that questioning policy changes aimed at achieving “equity” is itself an act of white supremacy—would not be tolerated, and those who disagreed were shouted down, hunted, assaulted, even battered.

-Heather Heying

Jobs are really, really, really, really hard to get. And since no reasonable person wants to put their livelihood in danger, we reasonably do not take any risks vis-a-vis momentarily upsetting liberal students. And so we leave upsetting truths unspoken, uncomfortable texts unread.

Stills of students wielding baseball bats and acting as a vigilante police force can be found on all corners of the internet.

Images of scores of armed members of the Washington State Patrol, clad in riot gear, patrolling campus offer a frightening look at what happens when campus administrators lose control of a college.